Roku OS 15.0.4 Breaks HEVC Decoding

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One of my hobbies is building my own streaming video library. I've been meaning to blog about it for awhile. Unfortunately, my intro to doing so is this.

Last week, Roku OS 15.0.4 found its way onto my Roku TV and Roku Ultra 4800R. And while the TV took it fine, the Ultra did not. Playback of HEVC video is now hampered by pixelation and freezing.

I wasn't sure if the Roku OS update was the culprit, or if it was the Jellyfin client for Roku that I use to stream videos from my Jellyfin server. But putting one of the (now) problematic videos onto a USB drive and playing it via Roku's own Media Player resulted in the same problem.

I found my way to the Roku community forums where the most recently updated post was about this happening when using the Plex app. As of today, that post is 17 days old. The response from Roku support has been...lacking. Very lacking. "It's under investigation." I left a comment mentioning this was unrelated to Plex and relayed my USB/Media Player info. No response. Then I began leaving comments on individual's comments. Finally, someone listened and began liking the comments I'd left for exposure.

At this point, one of Roku's community support members removed one of my comments mentioning Jellyfin, and turned it into its own topic (without reading any of the comments mentioning "Hey, this is unrelated to Plex or Jellyfin"). I replied with that information (again), and at this point in the story, someone who appears to be a higher-up in Roku's community support told the support member who'd moved my comment that it needed to be merged with the (original) thread, and that the thread needed to be renamed to remove Plex from the title and more accurately describe the issue as being related to HEVC playback.

As for the people actually investigating the problem...as of today, it's been 17 days since the issue was originally supported. I'd have hoped they'd have some handle on it by now. It only took me a few hours to rule out bad encode vs Jellyfin vs Roku (the culprit). They've got the source code, and the change log. In this amount of time, they haven't figured out what they broke? Or is it a communication problem between support and development? At any rate, things are a mess.

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